|
It may be urged that all the multiplicity and development are
the work of Nature, but that, since there is wisdom within the
All, there must be also, by the side of such natural operation,
acts of reasoning and of memory.
But this is simply a human error which assumes wisdom to be what
in fact is unwisdom, taking the search for wisdom to be wisdom
itself. For what can reasoning be but a struggle, the effort to
discover the wise course, to attain the principle which is true
and derives from real-being? To reason is like playing the
cithara for the sake of achieving the art, like practising with a
view to mastery, like any learning that aims at knowing. What
reasoners seek, the wise hold: wisdom, in a word, is a condition
in a being that possesses repose. Think what happens when one has
accomplished the reasoning process: as soon as we have discovered
the right course, we cease to reason: we rest because we have
come to wisdom. If then we are to range the leading principle of
the All among learners, we must allow it reasonings, perplexities
and those acts of memory which link the past with the present and
the future: if it is to be considered as a knower, then the
wisdom within it consists in a rest possessing the object
[absolved, therefore, from search and from remembrance].
Again, if the leading principle of the universe knows the future
as it must- then obviously it will know by what means that future
is to come about; given this knowledge, what further need is
there of its reasoning towards it, or confronting past with
present? And, of course, this knowledge of things to come-
admitting it to exist- is not like that of the diviners; it is
that of the actual causing principles holding the certainty that
the thing will exist, the certainty inherent in the
all-disposers, above perplexity and hesitancy; the notion is
constituent and therefore unvarying. The knowledge of future
things is, in a word, identical with that of the present; it is a
knowledge in repose and thus a knowledge transcending the
processes of cogitation.
If the leading principle of the universe does not know the future
which it is of itself to produce, it cannot produce with
knowledge or to purpose; it will produce just what happens to
come, that is to say by haphazard. As this cannot be, it must
create by some stable principle; its creations, therefore, will
be shaped in the model stored up in itself; there can be no
varying, for, if there were, there could also be failure.
The produced universe will contain difference, but its
diversities spring not from its own action but from its obedience
to superior principles which, again, spring from the creating
power, so that all is guided by Reason-Principles in their
series; thus the creating power is in no sense subjected to
experimenting, to perplexity, to that preoccupation which to some
minds makes the administration of the All seem a task of
difficulty. Preoccupation would obviously imply the undertaking
of alien tasks, some business- that would mean- not completely
within the powers; but where the power is sovereign and sole, it
need take thought of nothing but itself and its own will, which
means its own wisdom, since in such a being the will is wisdom.
Here, then, creating makes no demand, since the wisdom that goes
to it is not sought elsewhere, but is the creator's very self,
drawing on nothing outside- not, therefore, on reasoning or on
memory, which are handlings of the external.
|
|